In classic management doublespeak, Lattner said the arrangement
was a bad fit and later commented that "in the end," CEO Elon
Musk "and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and
that I should leave, so I did,"
Bloomberg's Dana Hull reported.

Musk is pushing hard on Autopilot at a time when the technology
is deviating significantly from what the rest of the industry is
pursuing. Tesla's tech is based on cameras and sensors, while the
more advanced efforts from Google and Uber use lidar, a far more
expensive option that senses its surroundings with lasers.

It's tempting to read between the lines of Tesla's move and
conclude that Autopilot is in trouble, stuck at its current level
of autonomous driving, with some interesting features such as
Summon and Autopark but not yet capable of delivering on Musk's
goal of sending a car from Los Angeles to New York by the end of
2017.

Autopilot is the state of the art for self-driving tech that's
on the road in consumer applications. Everything else is
either in the testing phase, intended for a fleet rollout, or
less capable than Autopilot. But it's unclear whether Tesla can
use its advantages, such as real-world fleet learning from its
plentiful cars, to keep pace with the lidar systems.

That might sound bad, and the shake-up in Palo Alto suggests that
Musk is far from happy. But in the grand scheme of things, it
doesn't matter.

A sideshow

caption

How Autopilot sees the world.

source

Tesla

The bottom line is that, despite all the buzz around self-driving
cars, it remains a sideshow in the auto industry. Just as we were
captivated by electric cars in 2010, we're dazzled by the dream
of autonomy in 2017. Electric cars today make up 1% of global
sales. Cars that possess anything more than advanced cruise
control make up 0% of global sales.

Tesla is wisely building Autopilot into all its current vehicles,
including the soon-to-launch Model 3 mass-market car. It makes
sense because Autopilot is a $5,000 option at the time of
purchase.

For the automaker, however, selling cars that can sort of drive
themselves is far less important than simply selling
cars.

It would be nice if a Tesla using Autopilot makes a
coast-to-coast run this year. But it's imperative that Tesla make
a big move up in annual deliveries if it hopes to hit Musk's goal
of a million by 2020 (the total for 2016 was less than 100,000).

The Autopilot shake-up could perform a useful service: We're only
a month from what is supposed to be the launch of the Model 3,
and there has been little in the way of preproduction buzz,
suggesting that Tesla could be racing to make its own deadline.

Seeing as though that's the company's most important goal, some
gossip about what is after all an option in its cars
could keep Tesla observers from fully focusing on what really
matters.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of
Business Insider.